"Let's do it," says Thierry Roussel. He sits down at the living-room table, opens the laptop, and heads for somewhere called Auchan Drive. "You said you wanted to come shopping with us," says his wife Isabelle. "So, um, this" – she at least has the grace to blush – "is it."

It's 10 o'clock on a Thursday evening in the Roussels' home in Cénac, a village in the vineyards 10 miles or so from (sort of) big-city Bordeaux. The two younger kids, nine-year-old Rémi and Mélanie, 13, are in bed; the eldest, Guillaume, 15, is on a school trip to London. Outside, an owl quarters the field behind the house, issuing the occasional startling hoot.

We're surrounded by vines. Mainly Côtes de Bordeaux and Entre-deux-Mers here: good solid wines, if nothing prestigious. This right bank of the Garonne river has apparently always been looked down on a bit by its snootier left-bank neigbours.

Most local people commute into Bordeaux, an elegant and now bustling city built on old colonial money and recently rescued from provincial torpor by an energetic mayor, the former prime minister Alain Juppé. He dusted off its grandeur and restored its gleaming 18th-century magnificence, and has contributed a renovated riverfront, an impressive new tram network and a pioneering VVB free bike scheme (Bordeaux had its long before Paris got Vélib) to the transformation.

But this, I feel, is hardly storybook France. Internet shopping? For food? What happened to the daily visit to the boulangerie, the épicerie, the boucherie; the bucolic weekly market under the shade of the plane trees on the proverbial sun-dappled village square; the petit verre de rouge at the café?

Still there, says Isabelle, and we do use them: fresh meat at the butcher's once a week, fruit and veg at the Sunday market, and bread from the village baker every day, because frankly, the hypermarket isn't up to much for all that. Very poor quality.

"But we shop online for the rest," she says. "That way we buy only what we need for the week, and we're not tempted by anything else: no treats, nothing not on the list. And once it's gone it's gone. No more biscuits is no more biscuits. No emergency visits to the minimarket."

They're not exactly struggling, the Roussels, but they have to be careful. In the laptop's glow, ticking boxes – butter, yoghurts, milk, brioches, three cheeses ("Used to be five"), pasta, rice, ham, saucisse, cereals, coffee – they check prices and special offers, opt for own-brand.

Because France, it seems, is still good to you, but only up to a point. In October 2009, Isabelle's father died, unexpectedly. Thierry, as usual, was working all hours, 60 or even 70 hours a week, up at 4am, back at 8pm, in charge of the non-fresh goods at a mammoth Bordeaux hypermarket: a big job, with a 14-strong team underneath him, responsible for maybe a third of the store's turnover. Now aged 45, he'd been in the business 22 years.

At the fag-end of December, he'd gone in at 3am "to help clear the last of the Christmas chocolates from the shelves, take down the seasonal displays, all that. Anyway, I started to feel ill. Real agony. Kidney stones, turned out. I needed four operations." In early February, still signed off work, he got a letter telling him he was suspended. Two weeks later he was fired, for what they said was faute grave: gross misconduct.

It was, says Thierry, bollocks; they had nothing concrete to reproach him with (quite the reverse; they'd recently offered him promotion), and certainly no hint of gross misconduct. But la grande distribution – fast-moving consumer goods, supermarkets, all that – is vicious in France. Your prices have to be the lowest, every day, on everything. Every centime counts. And past 40 or so, an employee starts to get expensive.

So like several of his former colleagues, Thierry finds himself with a case pending at the employment tribunal. He'll win, the lawyers say: this employer truly hasn't got a leg to stand on. But in the end the company will settle out of court. They always do; sadly, firing a person illegally and then settling is simply a lot cheaper than observing the full Gallic redundancy rigmarole.

But what with the appeals, the whole business will take four years. And in the meantime, Thierry's got a charge of gross misconduct hanging over him. So even if France does appear to be easing fairly smoothly out of recession (all around here they're building again; in two days I counted maybe 30 new private homes under construction), even if the jobs are out there, what chance has he got?

Friday morning, Thierry takes me to collect the shopping. Auchan Drive turns out to be satisfyingly French in that it's absurdly high-tech. The French have always loved their high-tech. Think Citroën DS (the original), Concorde, the TGV, the Minitel (maybe not). Anyway, within a specified half-hour window you pull up in your car at one of a dozen or so space-age touchscreen terminals scattered artfully around the forecourt of a humungous warehouse, and enter your order number.

"Bonjour, M Roussel," says the terminal, and displays your order. You check it, and if it's OK you insert your plastic and pay. It tells you which bay to go to, and roughly six seconds later a cheery and athletic young man with a wireless PDA thingy strapped to his forearm whizzes out on a 21st-century trolley packed with your shopping, and loads it into your car. Brilliant, if somewhat impersonal.

On the way home, thankfully, we stop off in the bigger village of Latresne, where Isabelle works, to buy the papers (Sud-Ouest, the local rag, and the sports fan's bible, l'Equipe). This is more like it: a properly busy French high street, the requisite brace of pharmacies (the French love their pills even more than their high-tech, even if they have recently had to start paying for some of them); a butcher or two, greengrocer, baker, beauty parlours a go-go, half a dozen estate agents.

Lots of stopping off and saying hello; lots of cheery banter about how le 15 de France had better crush Italy after that disgraceful loss to England: this is rugby country. (They didn't, sadly. "The coach," says Thierry succinctly afterwards, "is crap. This is not le beau jeu. In fact it isn't any kind of jeu at all, and that's what counts for a Frenchman: beautiful play.") That said, Thierry's more of a cycling man himself. In summer the Tour de France is sacred.

The Roussels eat plainly and economically, but healthily and – these days – very rarely out. Generally three, often four small courses. Thierry and Isabelle have lunch together at home, as they always have: "Our time for each other". A starter of crudités or carottes râpées maybe; simply cooked meat; salad; cheese; yoghurt or a fruit. Isabelle (what a country!) gets two hours for lunch.

Dinners are lighter and rarely feature meat, unless it's saucisse or maybe rillettes for starters. The main course might simply a plate of riz au beurre, or pasta with grated cheese. (They're also about good old-fashioned French family discipline: each child takes it in turns, on a rota, to lay the table, clear away, sweep up, and empty the bin.)

Evenings, they may be out doing something organised: Isabelle has gym, and the choir; the kids do swimming, drama, tennis, the village children's council, catechism ("We think it's important," says Isabelle, "in an age when some other religions are so active, that they have some grounding in the one that's determined our culture. After that, whether they believe or not, whether they practise, that's up to them. But they should know something rather than nothing").

Otherwise it's the telly: crime series, both American and French; game shows; dramas; French variety. They loathe reality TV. Rémi has his DS and the Wii; Guillaume his mangas; Mélanie likes Beverly Hills, 90210 and Twilight.

After lunch, Thierry takes out his job-hunting file: three inches thick, 10 applications or more every week for a year, a grand total of seven interviews and maybe two or three genuine possibilities, mostly at minimarkets for half the money he used to earn. He didn't need to take them. Not yet, anyway. Because while many here would agree the country's legendarily generous state isn't all it was, most people who lose their jobs are still entitled to around 60% – it used to be 70% – of their previous salary, for two years.

Thierry gets 54% because of that gross misconduct charge, but he still has another year of benefit to go; he's on €1,000 less than what he used to get, but it's manageable, especially now Isabelle, 40, for years a high-powered PA to a company director, is a civil servant at the local Communauté de Communes (CdC). A recent addition to France's complex administrative apparatus ("The millefeuille, we call it, it has that many layers"), the CdC groups together villages for larger, mutually beneficial projects.

A civil servant, or fonctionnaire, is a pretty fine thing to be in France, even if Isabelle, with her private-sector background, is sometimes exasperated by the famously obstreperous jobsworths who have traditionally tended to gravitate towards it. "Salaries are low," she says. "There's job security, obviously, though now it is at least theoretically possible for French civil servants to be fired . . . Imagine!

"The benefits are good, though they're being cut back all the time; pensions are the latest. I've no objection to working a few years longer, it's normal, we're all living longer. But pensions have to be enough for people to feel they've got something to look forward to. You shouldn't go into the civil service for what you can take out of it, though, and I think the mentality is changing. You really are a public servant: there to serve the collectivity. That's the way I see it, anyway."

All of that notwithstanding, the Roussels are a family of five – including two teenagers – living on just over €3,000 a month, after social security deductions but before tax. (I don't want to pry, but they probably don't pay a huge amount of that. With three kids, they're a French famille nombreuse, and as such entitled to an enviable array of tax breaks and reductions, not to mention €480 a month of means-tested child benefit.)

Out of that, of course, has to come a monthly mortgage of around €800; they still have a decade or so left to pay on their house, an airy three-bed bungalow built 10 years ago as part of a small development of similar homes on the edge of the village (it cost them the equivalent of £80,000 at the time, and is probably worth more than twice that now. There's a big garden, and the village, only 20 minutes from Bordeaux by car, is increasingly sought-after ).

Plus bills, of course, and €300 a month in school fees: both Mélanie and Guillaume go to private schools in Bordeaux, leaving at 7.30am and often not getting back until after six. Private, though, doesn't mean what it would in Britain: in France, private schools educate maybe 20% of all pupils (nearly a third of lycées are private). They're state-subsidised and charge, depending on the child's age and the school's location, between €500 and €2,000, maybe €3,000 in Paris. Per year, not per term.

Like many French, the Roussels are conscientious savers and reluctant to spend what they haven't got. They still put a couple of hundred a month into assorted life insurance and saving schemes; less than before, but it's important. Holidays used to be in rented apartments on the Med but now, says Isabelle, with a week's rental costing €900 or more: "We mostly go to my parents' small holiday flat in St-Lary in the Pyrenees. It's good because Rémi has an ear problem; there's specialist treatment there."

That afternoon, before driving into town to pick up Mélanie and two of her friends from school (they've just done human reproduction in biology and it's a raucous ride home, all erections and tadpoles and hysterical giggles) we go to nearby Bouliac, where Thierry grew up and his parents still live.

As often in France, family means a lot to the Roussels – and not just because Thierry's dad, a retired gendarme on the kind of pension no one will ever see again, is generous to a fault: Mélanie and Guillaume can both thank him for their laptops.

People have roots here, and they matter. Both Thierry's parents (his mother is Hungarian; she fled her homeland in 1956) and Isabelle's (her father worked for a big construction group before setting up a plumbing and heating business; he and her mother, from a more well-to-do family, met when she corresponded with him, an unknown soldier, in Algeria) moved around a lot before settling in Bordeaux. This generation wants to stay put.

Isabelle's three brothers – one took over her father's firm, the other two are in banking – all live within a short drive. Her mother is still in the handsome house across town where Isabelle grew up; a charming, sprightly, immaculately dressed lady whom Isabelle takes me to see on Saturday afternoon and who, over coffee and cakes, grills me expertly on my opinion of President Sarkozy without once revealing her own. (Isabelle voted for him, but like many now thinks he's "a buffoon, almost as bad as Berlusconi, just hopeless".)

These ties today place Thierry and Isabelle in a dilemma. "It's possible, even probable," says Isabelle, "that if Thierry gets offered another job, it'll be far away. In the centre, perhaps, or even the north. What would we do? How do you weigh up more money, more comfort, against this beautiful countryside, this climate, the warmth and support of a whole family?"

Thierry, for his part, wouldn't mind downscaling a bit, maybe running his own small supermarket, maybe with Guillaume, who like him has opted for the commercial route through his subject choices (Mélanie wants to be a primary school teacher). You need a wad of cash, though, to set up on your own, and Thierry's not willing to risk the house on that sort of project. Maybe one day. Maybe when he wins at the tribunal. For the time being, they're trying not to think too hard about all that.

Late, very late, on Saturday night, Guillaume comes back from his school trip to London. A great city, he says: "People can wear what they like, and no one even looks. No one gives a damn. It feels, like, free." And Camden Lock! What a place. Happy to be home, though.

So do the Roussels feel they're representative of France today? Yes, says Thierry. "We're slap in the middle, so we don't interest the politicians. Poorer than us and you get breaks and benefits; richer and you get special treatment, you're Sarkozy's mate. I never had the Socialists' 35-hour week, and I never saw Sarkozy's 'Work more to earn more'. We just get to pay for it all, taxed on everything, on pretty mean salaries. I don't have much faith in that changing."

Europe they take pretty much for granted: a good thing, obviously, and great that they can now drive from Bordeaux to Budapest to see Thierry's relatives every few years without seeing barbed wire and machine-guns. Could do with more harmonisation, though, to stop all the penny-pinching Bordelais buggering off to Andorra for cheap booze and fags and petrol. Immigration's "a ridiculous debate", says Thierry. "Hardly anyone in France is pure French. We've been happy to have them for so long now, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Moroccan, Algerian, African . . . How can anyone suggest 'France for the French' as a serious policy?" Although Marine le Pen will do well, he predicts: "A lot more nuanced, less conflictual, less scary than her father." And it annoys Isabelle when second- and third-generation immigrants talk to her in Arabic: "Like they're French when it suits them, and Algerian or Tunisian or whatever when it doesn't. Amazingly enriching, all these other cultures. But they should speak French."

And still proud, then? "Immensely," says Isabelle. "I think we have a beautiful country that has fought hard for important values. We don't believe in ultra-liberalism, we believe in protecting people from the full force of the market. What would have happened to us this past year if we'd been American? We'd have been on the street. And look at us French, always moaning. We don't know our luck. Trouble is, we're getting rid of it all, and without considering the consequences. Of course some reforms are necessary. But France mustn't let got of its principles, ever. We pay enough taxes to afford proper services. But I'm afraid they won't last. I'm really afraid it can't last."